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Sorry for the late reply here, but let me develop a bit more what I meant. I have a long and vast programming experience, but am also an entrepreneur with many projects that I switch between. I could have focused full-time on, say, React Native, and then I could churn out my monkey code all day long. But I don't spend full-time on RN and then suddenly 12 months passed where I didn't write any at all so my specific knowledge of that domain is always a bit behind.

But something like o4-mini-high is a domain expert in all versions of React, Redux, RN etc. and knows every internal SDK change over the last 10 years (or goes out and reads the changelogs and code itself). Countless times I've had it port old code to new and it figures it out 100%. It formulates good modern canonical ways to solve stuff. It knows all the stupid tricks you have to do to get RN stuff run well on Android and iOS that I would never be able to keep in my head unless I work full-time on that. And it does the eye-watering boring styling code that nobody likes, you can even just upload a screenshot of another app or a sketch on paper and it will correctly output code for the style in a matter of seconds.

The end result is that I can, without investing a full-time of keeping myself current, do a professional RN dual Android/iOS app development cycle because I have the general skill to understand what to ask it and how to merge its output properly. This leaves me time to do other stuff and generally be more productive.

My guess is that many who gave up on the AI coding stuff tried the bad tools like the default chatgpt 4o-mini (or tried the tools available 2 years ago) and got a bad experience. There are light-years of differences between these and something like o4-mini-high.

TL;DR: use the correct model for the job, and it doesn't really need to be an argument - if it makes you more productive it's a good tool, if it doesn't, nobody is forcing you to use it. But I don't think you should imply that everybody who likes these tools are stupid.



Stop telling everyone the secret.




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